When the phone rang about suppertime one day and Hannah answered it and came out to the kitchen and said to me, “It’s for you,” and I walked into the living room and picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” and this thin voice said, “Hi, Ed, how are you?” I had no idea at first who it could possibly be.
Then she said, “I know you have a lot of things to think over, Ed, and I wouldn’t have called you, but I thought it was important,” and then I knew who it was.
“Oh, hi, Betsy,” I said, trying for delight, and feeling very nervous because it hadn’t occurred to me it might be difficult to split from Betsy. It still hadn’t occurred to me it might be impossible.
But it very soon did, because the next thing she said was, “The thing is, Ed, I think I’m pregnant.”
We now have silence, the kind of silence that follows the last receding thud of a landslide that has just covered an Alpine town with several tons of rock and snow. No hope for survivors.
But hope doesn’t know there’s no hope. “Are you sure?” I said.
“Pretty sure,” she said.
All I could think of at first was her brothers. I knew Betsy had sort of broken with her family when she’d insisted on going to college, I knew none of them had looked upon her as being entirely respectable after that, but I didn’t know how deep this animosity ran. Would they decide that higher education had already so sufficiently ruined her that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was hardly worth considering, or would they decide she was still a Blake and family honor had been trampled in an affair that could only be settled with shotguns?
The silence ran on and on, and finally she said, in a very small and very thin voice, “I’m sorry.”
And my mind melted into my throat. I cleared it, and, “I’ll come up,” I said.
“Ed—” she said, and I knew she was going to give me an out, she was going to make a gesture and give me an opportunity to crawl through the letter slot and take off.
But I didn’t want it. Ten seconds earlier, yes. Ten minutes later, yes. But not then. I interrupted her. I said, “I’ll be there tonight.”
“All right,” she said.
We said a few more words, one at a time, and then we hung up and I went back to the kitchen and sat down and put some mashed potatoes in my mouth and they sat there on my tongue like a ball of mud. Mom was looking at me and Hannah was carefully not looking at me, both waiting to hear what the call had been, and Hester was drinking beer with dinner, which she said she was doing because she wanted to put a little weight on her hips.
Finally I swallowed the potatoes. I said, “Remember Betsy?”
Mom nodded. “A nice girl,” she said, noncommittally.
Hannah looked at me. “Did something happen to her?”
“She’s pregnant,” I said.
Hannah recoiled, and Hester said, “Hah!” She laughed, Hester did, and said, “You better pack, Ed.”
I grinned weakly at her, as though I thought she was joking, but I knew she was absolutely serious and absolutely right and I was absolutely not going to do anything about it.
Mom, with something grim in her voice, said, “You are going to marry the girl, aren’t you?” I suppose she was remembering my father, who’d maybe had second thoughts in his time, too.
“Oh, sure,” I said, as though nothing else had even for a second occurred to me. “I’m going up there,” I said, and looked at Hester, hoping to see understanding on her face, but she was drinking beer and it was several weeks before I could catch her eye again and then there was nothing in it.
Would it be ridiculous to say Hester is my father figure?
That evening I took the eight-ten bus out of Albany, and Betsy met me at the bus stop diner in Monequois at eleven-forty. She had her brothers’ truck, which I had never learned to drive. We didn’t kiss, and we looked at each other very solemnly, and I thought vaguely about murdering her. But then I thought. Could I get away with it? And then I thought, I know damn well I couldn’t. If I can’t even get away with fucking her, I’m certainly not going to get away with killing her.
She drove me to the Northway Motel, where Mom and Hannah had stayed in June, and I got a room, and she came in with me, and we talked. We discussed things, different people’s attitudes, where and when we would get married, that we were going to live for a while with my mother in Albany, and all the time we sat side by side on the single bed without touching, without very often looking at each other, and we didn’t kiss. I had no more desire for her than for a goat. Finally she asked me if I was hungry and I said no and she said she’d see me tomorrow and she left. She paused in the doorway, and I understood she wanted me to kiss her then, not because she wanted to be kissed exactly, but because at that moment that was the required gesture, and I couldn’t do it. I had come up here, I would take the blood test and get the license and marry her, but I couldn’t kiss her. I just couldn’t do it. And I didn’t.
The marriage took five days. The day before the wedding, in the early afternoon, I was over at Betsy’s house and her father said his first complete sentence to me. He said, “Can you spare a few minutes?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t doing anything, I was just standing around waiting for the cement to harden.
“Good,” he said. “Come on.”
I followed him out of the house, and his dark blue Edsel station wagon with the greasy metal things lying in the back was parked out by the curb. You understand that that Edsel was at least fifty per cent of his character, or anyway I hope you understand that. An Edsel, for God’s sake. What was it then, eight years old? I understand he has a Pontiac now, so if you have any GM stock maybe you ought to sell.
In the meantime we got into the car. It was very huge inside, the seat seemed to be impossibly far back, and of course everything in the car was grimy and greasy and looked as though it was carefully rubbed down every day with used crankcase oil.
Betsy’s father started the engine and pulled away from the curb and looked out the gray windshield as he said, “I told them we were going. I told them we’ll get back soon.”
“Good,” I said.
He’s a lousy driver, of the sort who is somehow too far removed from the actions of the car. The car seemed to lumber through Monequois on its own momentum, sagging around the curves a little too fast, drooping along the straightaways a little too slow. After a while I stopped looking through the gray windshield and spent my time studying instead his right thumb.
Betsy’s father has a habit of chewing the nail of his right thumb, gnawing on it while the complexities of life wash sluggishly over him, and as a result that right thumb is clean. He is five feet four and a half inches of unrelieved grime in baggy engineer’s overalls, with right in the middle of it this pink thumb tip. It’s like a beacon, like Rudolph’s nose. If he were ever totally demolished in an automobile accident, which seems to me only inevitable, and I was asked to identify him, I’d say, “Let’s see his right thumb.” It wouldn’t even have to be on his hand, it could be torn off in the collision and I’d know it. They’d open this little box like you get a pen and pencil set in, and there would be this jointed penis sort of thing, all greasy and grimy with a gleaming pink tip, and I’d turn to Betsy and say, “I’m sorry, Betsy, but I’m afraid there’s no hope. It is Dad.”